Time loops. Characters or players are forced to live out the same situations over and over until they are able to overcome their mistakes and progress. While time loop movies are very easily separated from non time loop movies, things can get more muddled in the context of video games. In thinking about the conventional time loop, repeated failure followed by returning to an earlier time, in terms of player experience — almost every game can be seen as a time loop.
I will admit, the obvious problem of calling every game a time loop game is that any taxonomic value is lost. The thing that normally separates games we consider time loop games is the diegetic nature of the time loop. The characters of the game are in some way aware that the game is repeatedly reverting to an earlier time, and acquire information that is preserved when time restarts. Newly gained information is then applied to gain more information and eventually end the time loop and the game. For games structured around a narrative, looking solely at the diegetic quality of the resets is usually a good rule of thumb. But what about games without obvious narratives?
There are many games where the player does not control an avatar with an obvious personality or sense of self. The avatar of the game is primarily an extension of the player, and the motivations of the player are mapped perfectly onto the avatar. In games where the diegetic nature of certain elements is not obvious, should the focus not be on player experience? For these games, when the player reaches a failure state and is returned to an earlier part of the game, we can view the reset as a sort of time loop. The player keeps the knowledge of everything they have experienced, and they keep all the skills gained.
My main purpose for writing this is not actually to make the claim that every game should be called a time loop. I do think that it is interesting to explore a time loop from both a narrative perspective and a gameplay perspective, and that discussing the differences in these methodologies can shed more light on how we classify games.
This was an interesting post! I think it really gets at the idea that sometimes the divisions we put on art and media are really just our own, kind of feeble attempts at classifying and organizing the world around us. Tons of genres, like roguelikes earlier in the quarter, end up being really hard to define beyond “you know it when you see it,” and we can really only get so much use out of dividing things up by genre. Genres are what we make of them, and they’re only important insofar as they can be useful to us.